Movie Review: The End of Time

Undated Handout -- The End of Time ( Directed by Peter Mettler) Dancer of Halau I Ka Pono, Hawaii. Courtesy of Grimthorpe Film. "The End of Time"

Photograph by: Grimthorpe Film
, Postmedia News

Rating: Three and a half stars out of five

The title isn’t all that appropriate, because in a lot of ways, Peter Mettler’s latest film is really more about the birth of time than its final tick.

A vast, non-linear experimental documentary that attempts to map the very boundaries of our temporal reality, The End of Time takes us to a variety of different locations around the world as it explores the different meanings and applications of time as the Y-axis of experience.

We start at CERN, the particle accelerator in Switzerland where scientists are busy designing head-on collisions for subatomic bits of the universe. They are trying to replicate the big bang in miniature, and as we listen to them speaking, it’s not their scientific knowledge that really comes through – but their humanity.

It’s a subtle thing: The decision to shoot handheld, the medium framing instead of talking head close-up and the inclusion of giggles and asides. They all ensure these highly intelligent and knowledgeable experts remain human, and as such mortal and vulnerable to time.

Documentary filmmakers tend to use scientists as empirical data – people who can spit out facts and legitimize a given editorial stance. They are used as tools, not human voices, but Mettler keeps everyone fastened to terra firma.

In doing so, no one is allowed to get too big – despite the magnification of the movie screen – because time is a force with universal power.

We all feel small when we think of time and the geological ages that preceded the emergence of homo sapiens, and Mettler never lets the arrogance of the modern digital age distort his lens.

Going for as much folksy charm as artsy credibility, Mettler shows us ordinary folks with great big brains walking through a circular labyrinth of technology. Like little mice in a maze of their own design, these particle physicists scrambling through the bowels of CERN are small, but they’re scratching at something monumental.

Mettler repeats this motif in his other locations, most graphically when he visits a volcanic island in the Pacific. Once inhabited, the island began to lose residents when the volcano became active and started spewing out lava flows. Now a ghost town where roads are covered in giant blobs of hardened molten rock, the whole landscape feels alien.

Yet, as we meet the last man standing – his house surrounded by a wasteland of scorched trees and rocky rivers of glowing red rocks – we’re forced to think about our short lifespans in relation to the Earth’s continuing evolution.

Mettler shows us astronomical images of our sun, as well as the other countless dots of light pouring down on us from space, reminding us just how brief our time on the planet really is – but at the same time, hinting at our connection to something much larger.

Using circles and mandala-like forms as visual motifs, Mettler also probes the spiritual side of time. For this, we enter the Buddhist reality, where time is continuous and the human challenge is to remain in the here and now.

Once a natural inclination, our impulse to meditate has been squashed by the compression of time. We don’t “have time” to sit still any more. Obsessed by events that have happened in the past, or preoccupied by thoughts of looming tragedy in the future, the human animal is finding it increasingly difficult to simply be.

The concept of time has altered us in profound ways that we’re not aware of because the construct is all-pervasive: Practically every electronic device on the market also has a clock function.

Without time, we wouldn’t know where to be at any given moment, and in this day and age, that’s a paralyzing notion.

Mettler accesses this trap door of common perception and lets us slip through the hole, freefalling for the duration as we recalibrate the most oppressive measurement of existence.

It’s an oddly mellow, de-stressing voyage because by taking time to task, Mettler gives us permission to question the iron hands and mechanical drive that reduces us to slavery.

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